B0061QB04W EBOK (11 page)

“Don’t you think there’s beauty here, too?” I asked Tía Emperatriz. She looked out the window and didn’t answer. As the cab made its way to the heart of the city, I continued to think that there was beauty everywhere around us. But when the cab stopped in front of el zócalo, where I saw mothers and fathers strolling about holding hands with their children, I realized that it didn’t matter what I thought of Iguala.

Without my parents here, it was a place of broken beauty.

Though I felt better after the shot, Tía Emperatriz said I should sleep with her that night. I lay on her bed and watched her towel-dry her hair. She always bathed in the evenings because she said it helped her sleep better. She climbed into bed and turned off the light. It felt so strange to have a woman’s body next to mine. In the two years my mother had been gone, I’d forgotten what it felt like to sleep with her.

I listened to my aunt’s soft breathing. I wished I could close my eyes and snuggle next to her. I wished I could bury my face in her hair that smelled of roses. But instead, I moved to the other side of the bed, as far away as possible. I put my finger in my belly button and thought of my mother.

Mago would sometimes say, “I don’t see Tía as my mother. She’s more like an older sister to me.” And yet, when we walked through the gates of the school for our parent-teacher conferences, Mago would put her arm through Tía Emperatriz’s and look as proud as could be. She insisted Tía Emperatriz pick up
her
report card first. When we entered her classroom, Mago’s classmates and teacher looked at Tía Emperatriz with admiration. She looked so elegant in her red high heels, pretty blue dress, and stylish haircut.

“Is that your mother?” one of the students asked, because for a moment everyone seemed to have forgotten that our mother was very far away.

“She’s our aunt,” I quickly said.

Mago glared at me.

Just because she takes care of us when we’re sick, makes us pretty dresses once in a while, combs our hair up in ponytails without pulling on it, wants to know what we learned in school, notices when our underwear is full of holes and needs to be replaced, sees the dirt behind our ears and cares enough to make us bathe, that doesn’t mean she could take Mami’s place, I told Mago afterward.

“I said she’s like an older sister to me, okay?” Mago yelled.

And yet she was not happy when two months earlier we’d learned of Tía Emperatriz’s secret: she had a boyfriend. We were perched in the guamúchil tree when a taxicab pulled over and stopped right underneath us. As they kissed, Carlos and I covered our mouths and tried not to giggle, but Mago was shocked. They never saw us up there. We were very quiet, and they were too busy kissing to pay attention. Tía Emperatriz didn’t want Abuela Evila to know she had a boyfriend. She started wearing skirts a little above her knee, but when she came home she lowered them so that Abuela Evila wouldn’t see. Up from the tree, we could see her wipe the makeup off her face before coming into the house.

Abuela Evila never approved of any of my aunt’s suitors, so my aunt was already considered a spinster. She was going into her thirties, and women there start getting married as soon as they become señoritas, even to this day.

“You should be happy for her,” I told Mago as we watched Tía Emperatriz sneak out of the house to see her boyfriend.

“If she leaves, then what’s going to happen to us?” Mago said.

“Mami and Papi are coming back soon,” I said.

“Wake up, Reyna. Look over there, do you see that?”

I turned to look at Papi’s dream house. A foundation, one unfinished wall, exposed rebar. The house looked as fragile as the skeleton of the dead sparrow Mago and I once found in the vacant lot, which Mago said had been spit out by a snake.

“They aren’t coming back until that house is finished,” Mago said. “It’s taken Papi four years to build a foundation and half a wall. How long do you think it will take him to build the rest?”

On Monday I returned to school. It was Mother’s Day, my third Mother’s Day without Mami. The students in all grade levels were doing arts and crafts projects. In my class we made a bouquet of tulips using egg cartons, which we cut out and shaped before painting them red, yellow, or pink.

El maestro gave us pink paper so that we could make a card for our mothers. It was hard for me to write YO AMO A MI MAMÁ, as we were told to do. I folded the paper in half and then snuck it into my book.

I thought of the day I learned to spell “Mamá.” We were doing phonics, and el maestro wrote on the board MI MAMÁ ME MIMA. MI MAMÁ ME AMA. We had to repeat after him as he pointed to the words. “Mi mamá me mima. Mi mamá me ama.”
My mama spoils me. My mama loves me.
My throat began to close up, and I wiped the moisture from my eyes. When he said to write the sentences ten times I couldn’t stop my hand from shaking as I wrote the words down. And then I started to rearrange the words so that they formed a question: ¿ME AMA MI MAMÁ?
Does my mama love me?

If so, why is she so far away?

As Mago, Carlos, and I walked home after school, we talked about the projects we had made. Mago’s class had made carnations with red yarn. Carlos’s class made posters using finger paints. He made a big heart that read “Te Quiero Mucho,” but he hadn’t written the name of the person he loved, either.

“Let’s give them to Tía Empera,” Carlos said. “Mami isn’t here anyway. She won’t find out about it.”

“We could give them to Abuelita Chinta, next time she comes,” I said.

“Tía Empera is nice to us,” Mago said.

“And
today
is Mother’s Day. Who knows when Abuelita Chinta is going to come,” Carlos said.

“We could save them for Mami,” I insisted. “We’ll give them to her when she returns.”

In the evening, Tía Emperatriz came home with a bouquet of flowers for Abuela Evila. She also brought rotisserie chicken for dinner.

It wasn’t until after her bath that Mago said we needed to decide what we wanted to do. When we couldn’t agree on anything, Mago stood up and said, “I’m going to give her my carnations. Do whatever you want.”

I glanced at the photo of Papi, wishing for the thousandth time that we had a photo of Mami, too. I was forgetting what she looked like, smelled like, felt like. I couldn’t remember the sound of her voice, the way she laughed. Every time I closed my eyes to remember, I would hear Tía Emperatriz’s laughter. If I took a breath, I would inhale the fragrance of Tía Emperatriz’s shampoo that smelled of roses.

I went to the living room where my aunt was drying her hair. “Tía, we want to give you this,” Mago said as she shyly handed the bouquet of yarn carnations to her.

“And this,” Carlos said, handing her the poster that read “Te Quiero Mucho.” I stood back. I held on to my bouquet of tulips and hid behind Mago.

“Oh, my goodness,” Tía Emperatriz said. “What a sweet surprise!” She took Mago’s and Carlos’s presents. I clutched Mago’s dress so hard that she yanked it away. She pushed me toward Tía Emperatriz.

It was so difficult for me to completely give myself over to my feelings for Tía Emperatriz. As much as I loved her, there were two possibilities hovering in the horizon that would separate me from her. Either my parents would return soon or she would marry and leave to have children of her own. Either way, I would lose her. After having already lost both my parents, how could I bear to get attached to someone I would lose as well?

But she’s here now
, I had told myself that evening, and so I walked to her and offered her my gift.

“Here, Tía,” I said. “I made this.” I couldn’t bring myself to say “for you” because it wasn’t true.

“Thank you so much for this, niños,” Tía Emperatriz said, giving us each a hug. As we went back to our room, I looked back at Tía Emperatriz, who was putting our art projects on her nightstand. I ran back to give her one more hug.

“Thank you, Tía,” I said, and I went back to my room and dreamed of roses.

10

“¡A
PÚRATE!”
M
AGO SAID
as she stopped to wait for me. I walked faster to catch up with her and Carlos, being careful not to spill any more water from the buckets I carried in each hand, but they were already half empty.

“Why do we need to carry our own water from the well?” I asked again for the hundredth time. “Why can’t we use what’s in the water tank?”

“Because our grandmother is a bitter old woman,” Mago said. “And let’s not complain today, or she won’t let us go with our aunt.”

That afternoon, Tía Emperatriz was going to take us to the movie theater to watch
La Niña de la Mochila Azul,
starring Pedrito Fernández,
who was really cute, and both Mago and I had a big crush on him. School had ended the previous week, and we got really good grades, so the movie was Tía Emperatriz’s present to us. This was my first time going to the movie theater, and I couldn’t wait.

When we finally made it home from the well, I only had a little water left in my buckets, my ankles were raw from being scraped by the buckets, and my palms were red and blistered.

But I thought about Pedrito Fernández, and I could already hear him singing my favorite song:
La de la mochila azul. La de ojitos dormilones …
I was humming this song as we walked through the gate. I stopped when I saw a woman standing in the patio holding a little girl in her arms. The woman was wearing a burgundy dress and golden high-heeled sandals that glittered in the sun. I couldn’t see her face very well because she had big dark sunglasses on. Her hair was permed and dyed red. She looked like a TV star. The little girl in her arms was dressed in pink ruffles and lace. She was a chubby baby, her cheeks so puffy it seemed as if her mouth were stuffed with cotton candy.
This little girl must have a lot of good food to eat, wherever she lives,
I thought. I’d never seen such a healthy-looking baby before.

“Well, aren’t you going to say hello to your mother?” the woman asked with a smile.

We stayed by the gate, holding our buckets.

“Don’t just stand there,” Abuela Evila said. “Go get your things ready.”